Category: Anti-gun

The firearm is the most versatile self-defense tool that Man has ever developed. It allows the physically weak to equal and potentially best the strong. A 98 pound grandmother can drop a 250 pound thug with one squeeze of the trigger. There’s a make and model that will suit any user or application. But, there are times when you are unable, or not allowed, to have access to a firearm when you really, REALLY need one.

What got me thinking about this was a trip to Disneyland. Disney has really stepped up their game when it comes to security. They used to concentrate on purses and backpacks that guests were carrying into the park. This meant searching mostly women (Who generally aren’t a threat) and ignoring men (…and most violent perps are men!). I don’t know how many times I walked into the park with my knife and they didn’t notice because they were too busy looking in my wife’s purse. That’s no longer the case. Everyone gets looked at now! So now that the knife stays in the car, I started thinking about “what if” scenarios. (Yes, that’s the sort of thing I do while waiting in line at The Happiest Place On Earth. Doesn’t everyone?) I began to notice that there are potential weapons everywhere. These aren’t stand-off weapons like a gun, but neither is a knife.

A school or an office is no different. There are potential weapons all around you. You just have to start seeing things for what they can be made into rather than what they are now. A chair is a place to plant your butt; until you throw it at someone’s head.

Students (or office workers) are taught to lock doors and keep quiet during an active shooter attack. This is a good start. In a classroom, there are lots of heavy objects like tables and file cabinets. Use these to barricade the door. The chairs in the room make nice projectile weapons or clubs, should someone force the door open. (It’s not easy to aim a gun when there’s a chair flying at your face!) Pens and pencils make adequate stabbing instruments; especially when directed at an attacker’s eyes. Look around and think about how this or that can be used to inflict life threatening injuries. Work in teams. While one group of students is throwing things, others should be moving flank the attacker.

Sounds dangerous? It is. But at this point, what have you got to lose?! At the very least, you turn yourself into a moving target. Passivity won’t save your life. You may become someone else’s “meat shield”, but that’s about all sitting and cowering will do.

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Like Ned Stark memes appearing around the winter solstice, there are some things that just aren’t surprising. They appear like clockwork; as predictable as the tides. One of these regular, cyclical events is the run on firearms that precedes a new gun law taking effect. And yet, there are some people who are shocked and amazedevery time it happens again.

The last 8 years of the Obama regime have seen otherworldly increases in firearms sales. The Bamster’s every anti-gun utterance, no matter how vaguely worded, saw a fresh run on gun stores. Ultimately, the man’s term in office was an unqualified failure. Other than a few executive orders that were intended to harass law abiding gun owners, he was unable to pass a single piece of anti-gun legislation. He swung for the fences with his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, but struck out. Now President Donald Trump will appoint the successor to Antonin Scalia.

Which brings us to Neverland-by-the-Sea.

The California Democrat Party, for reasons that I actually can’t guess, passed a wagon load of new gun regulations this year. I say that I cannot understand their reasoning because it wasn’t necessary as a political device. The extreme, anti-gun left wasn’t threatening to bolt for another party, nor was there any other reason to placate this one, small wing of their coalition. A bunch of us, myself included, expected Governor Pan to be the adult in the room and say no. But alas, he got into the pixie dust and flew off with the rest of his Party to chase pirates while Californians flew off to their local gun stores.

In light of the election of President Trump, one might think that a temper tantrum was involved, but that forgets recent history. The Lost Boys and Lost Girls in Sacramento passed their laws when it looked to everyone like Hillary Clinton would be appointing Scalia’s replacement. They quite unnecessarily blew off a very large bomb from their political arsenal. Even if they somehow knew that Hillary was toast, they’d also have to have known that President Trump will be in a position to bring California back into line with the US Constitution. Which would mean…

OK…

And with that, I’m gonna stop writing. I just realized that I’m shocked and amazed that the anti-gun left did something balmy for no apparent reason. I shoulda seen that coming.

The program runs through each condition checking to see if it’s true. Once it finds a matching condition, it executes the appropriate code. Something similar happens with gun laws. In this case, let’s look at how law abiding citizens are reacting to the “bullet button” ban, SB 880.

The options are:

Ignore the law and do nothing.

Rush out and buy a new modern sporting rifle with a bullet button release.

Californians aren’t picking option 1. These rifles are flying off the shelves at gun stores around the State. If the intent of SB 880 was to reduce the number of modern sporting rifles in California, it’s already failed miserably.

This leads us to a variation on our pseudocode: The nested if/elseif statement. The general form is:

And you can see how these can go on and on; nest after nest after nest or nest within nest within nest. In this case, we’ve already entered the next layer. Since “Do nothing” has been rejected, that leads to more choices:

Register your bullet button guns as “assault weapons”.

Modify them to make them “featureless”.

Ignore the law.

Some people will take option 1. Most will likely reject it since history teaches that registration leads to confiscation. To make a modern sporting rifle “featureless”, new magazine releases like “BB Reloaded” will likely suffice. There are also wraps for the pistol grip that may be legal too. (These prevent the thumb from reaching around the grip.) Other designers propose stocks that look more like a classic Monte Carlo stock. We’re awaiting legal guidance on all of these. By making the affected arms “featureless”, these modifications avoid the law’s mechanism to require registration.

That leads us to option 3. This isn’t legal advice, but there’s no way to tell just by looking at a rifle sitting on a shooting bench whether it’s been properly registered or not. “Papered” guns look just like outlawed guns.

So what were the geniuses in Sacramento thinking of when they passed Sb 880? They only imagined “option 1”. They expected all California gun owners to line up like sheep at an abattoir and register their rifles for convenient confiscation at a later date. Since the bullet button was an engineering response to a prior law, some might have guessed that the same engineers could come up with an “option 2”. But, none of them envisioned “option 3” as a choice. It never occurred to them that we might just ignore them, despite history to the contrary.

Now there’s yet another nested if/elseif layer and this is a choice for our betters in Sacramento to make: So whacha gonna do about it?

Supporters have a long row to hoe. The process is already rigged to go against them. Sec. Alex Padilla approved the petition applications but with the same inflammatory terms, such as “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazines”, that the laws use. He’s legally obligated to do so since the initiatives must characterize the laws in the same way that the legislature did. If the Legislature referred to standard capacity magazines as “high capacity”, then the initiative to overturn the law in question must do so as well. The initiatives’ supporters will have a hard time convincing gun muggles to support their efforts; first to put the initiatives on the ballot and then to approve them. How many soccermoms do you imagine will support protecting “assault weapons”?

Seriously, if you are in your garage, manufacturing a gun, would you tell government? If you were in your computer room using a 3-D printer to create a gun, why would you tell government? The reason you are doing it yourself is that you do not trust government. For instance, if you are in a messy divorce and your spouse claims abuse, government can take your weapons without any proof of a crime. None. We no longer live in a constitutionally protected nation—think about the illegal aliens allowed to break the law, with the protection of government.

We’vementionedthisbefore. If you hate guns, but love the rule of law, then you should hate gun laws. They do not actually control guns or gun ownership. Instead, they encourage lawlessness and make the legal system contemptible. If your desire is a peaceful society with less violence, then the very last thing you ought to be doing is causing the People themselves to hate and despise the laws that are supposed to govern them. This is what gun laws like AB 857 do. They make criminals out of the law abiding and do nothing to stop actual criminals.

While I don’t claim to be an expert on California election law, my understanding is that initiatives of this type cause the affected laws to be held in abeyance until the matter is decided by the People. And given that the Fall ballot is already crowded with upwards of 21 measures, missing the deadline for the November ballot might not be a bad thing. Past elections have shown that voters tend to vote “no, no, no, no, no, no… NO!” when confronted by voter guides the size of a small encyclopedia. It may be better for these initiatives to appear on a later, less crowded ballot rather than joining the electoral flash mob on the Fall 2016 ballot.

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There are some things in life that are truly mysterious. Who first realized that grinding up the extremely bitter seeds of a particular tree and brewing the grounds in hot water would produce something like coffee? Why do Prius owners all seem to be such horrible drivers? How is a law enforcement officer supposed to recognize a legit serial number on a home-built firearm?

It’s that last one that we’ll talk about here. California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 857 this week that requires anyone building a firearm to first obtain a serial number from the State. So what I’m wondering, and I’m probably not alone here, is how law enforcement is supposed to recognize a legitimately serialized firearm versus one with a few random characters stamped into it?

Imagine the following situation: You’re a member of the CA-DOJ gun detail. You’re at a shooting range. You look at three people at the bench and they’re all shooting AR-style rifles. One was purchased from a gun store as a complete rifle. One was purchased as separate upper and lower receivers and then assembled into a complete rifle. The third was home built from an “80%” lower receiver and then assembled to a purchased upper receiver. So riddle me this, Batman, how can you tell at a glance which is which?

Now let’s say that, somehow, you can tell at a glance which is which. You’ve magically identified the 80% lower. You look at it and it’s serialized. Unless the number is “12345”, how do you know that it’s actually a Callee-for-nai-aye issued number?

Of course, the answer is that you can’t; anymore than you could actually tell, at a glance, that this rifle was store-bought and that one was homemade. You could check the State’s database, but what’s your probable cause for doing so?

Gov. Brown signed a number of really stupid gun laws this week. The intent of these laws is to cow the people of California into surrendering their arms. The principle problem with such laws is that they require the cooperation of those who are the target of said laws and that’s more than a little bit of a problem. Americans are known for not cooperating with laws intended to disarm them. We could begin a look at this uniquely American behavior starting on April 19, 1775, but let’s talk about more recent times.

In the 1970s, Illinois passed a handgun registration law. The estimated compliance rate was 25%.

Only about 10% of the “assault weapons” estimated to be in the State were registered after California’s Roberti-Roos Act in 1989. (The NY Times estimated that the rate was only about 2%.)

In 1990, New Jersey passed an “assault weapon” ban. The compliance rate was, at best, 1%.

The AB-23 registration period in California expired on December 31, 2000. Only 27,000 of the State’s estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 affected “assault weapons” were registered by the deadline. That’s a compliance rate of 2.5-5%.

In 2011, Connecticut passed an “assault weapon” and “high capacity” magazine ban. At the time, the State estimated that there were nearly 400,000 affected arms and roughly 2,000,000 affected magazines. Only about 50,000 rifles were registered and only about 38,000 magazines were registered; 12.5% and 2% respectively.

The New York SAFE Act of 2013 saw only about 45,000 of the Empire State’s estimated 1,000,000 “assault weapons” registered. 4.5%.

In 2013, Sunnyvale, CA, banned “high capacity” magazines. None have been surrendered to the police.

In 2013, San Francisco, CA, banned “high capacity” magazines. None have been surrendered to the police.

In 2015, Los Angeles, CA, banned “high capacity” magazines. None have been surrendered to the police.

All of these failed laws have a few things in common. They were all passed in “blue” states. One would think that residents of these states would be the most likely to comply with such laws. All have proven to be unenforceable. All have thus degraded respect for the rule of law. All are directed at innocent citizens who haven’t actually committed any crimes. But, for the most part, they’ve avoided poking the bear. With the exception of the magazine bans, they’ve studiously avoided confiscation.

As ill advised as previous bans were, their authors understood the meaning of the legal term of art “taking”. Our current government in Sacramento doesn’t seem to understand what their elders understood: A taking risked opening a can of legal worms that best remained in the can. The intent of the laws was to appear to be banning this or that; not actually doing anything. It’s a scam directed at the anti-gun, moonbat left. These new laws, however, do far worse than expose the State to the legal consequences of a taking. They’ve up and poked the bear. The best the ruling elites can now hope for is quiet political change come November.

If we’re all really lucky, votes will decide what happens next. If we’re not so lucky, the idiots in Sacramento will take their lead from their colleagues in Connecticut and resort to threats of violence against the People. The problem with making threats is that someone, someday, may call your bluff.

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The California Legislature, showing their utter disdain for the Constitution and their undying hatred of California gun owners, has sent a laundry list of anti-gun bills to the Governor’s desk. Gov. Brown has already vetoed similar bills in the past. It is being reported that Brown will act on these bills as early as 11am Friday before he heads to Europe.

NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT!

Assembly Bill 857would require an individual to request a serial number from DOJ for home-built firearms. Anti-gun advocates are under the impression that criminals who are already ignoring the law will apply for a serial number issued from DOJ prior to use. This bill would do nothing but entrap law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights. Governor Brown vetoed similar legislation in 2014.

Assembly Bill 1135 and Senate Bill 880would make changes of monumental scale to California’s firearm laws by reclassifying hundreds of thousands of legally owned semi-automatic rifles as “assault weapons.” This legislation effectively outlaws magazine locking devices, more commonly known as “bullet buttons”. These areconstitutionally protected firearms that have no association with crime. These changes would happen quickly with great individual costs to many gun owners and without public notice. Governor Brown vetoed similar legislation in 2013.

Assembly Bill 1511would effectively end the long-standing practice of temporarily loaning a firearm for lawful purposes. Under this legislationthe ability to loan a firearm to anyone other than a family member would now be prohibited unless conducted through a dealer, absent very narrow and limited exceptions. A simple loan to a trusted friend for a few days would take almost a month to complete from loan to return, requiring two background checks, two 10 day waiting periods, two fees and multiple trips to a gun dealer. The result of the misguided legislation would turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals simply for borrowing or storing a firearm with a friend.

Assembly Bill 1673 would expand the definition of “firearm” to include unfinished frames and/or receivers that are “clearly identifiable as being used exclusively as part of a functional weapon”. Depending on how this vague terminology is interpreted, AB 1673 could essentially treat pieces of metal as firearms, subjecting them to California’s exhaustive regulations and restrictions currently applicable to firearms.

Assembly Bill 1674would expand the existing one handgun a month law to include ALL guns, including those acquired through a private party transfer. AB 1674 will have no impact on criminal access to firearms and instead significantly hamper law abiding individuals, causing increased costs, time and paperwork to purchase multiple firearms. Criminals will continue to ignore this law purchasing firearms illegally, ignoring this burdensome and ineffective restriction.

Assembly Bill 1695 would create a 10-year firearm prohibition for someone convicted of falsely reporting a lost or stolen firearm. The NRA does not oppose making it a misdemeanor to knowingly file a false lost or stolen report to law enforcement. Our reason for opposition is related to the restriction of a constitutional right for the conviction of a misdemeanor offense.

Assembly Bill 2607would expand the class of individuals who could seek a Gun Violence Restraining Order (GVRO).” The NRA opposes the current GVRO procedures because they provide a mechanism for an individual to lose the right to keep and bear arms with no due process of law. AB 2607 would compound these problems by significantly expanding the classes of individuals who could seek a GVRO. This expansion would now include employers, coworkers, mental health workers and employees of secondary and postsecondary schools.

Senate Bill 894 would require a victim of a crime to report to local Law Enforcement the theft of a firearm within an arbitrary time requirement of five days and the recovery of the firearm within 48 hours. Governor Brown has twice vetoed similar legislation stating, “I was not convinced that criminalizing the failure to report a lost or stolen firearm would improve identification of gun traffickers or help law enforcement disarm people prohibited from possessing guns. I continue to believe that responsible people report the loss or theft of a firearm and irresponsible people do not.”

Senate Bill 1235 would place unjustified and burdensome restrictions on the purchase of ammunition and would require the attorney general to keep records of purchases. This legislation would further require any online ammunition sales to be conducted through a licensed vendor. First and foremost, the reporting of ammunition sales has already been tried — and failed — at the federal level. Throughout the 1980s, Congress considered repeal of a federal ammunition regulation package that required, among other things, reporting of ammunition sales. In 1986, the director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms supported eliminating the reporting requirement, stating: “The Bureau and the [Treasury] Department have recognized that current record keeping requirements for ammunition have no substantial law enforcement value.” As a result, the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 repealed the ammunition restrictions, with little opposition to the removal of that requirement. SB 1235 will similarly fail to reduce violent crime, as a law requiring the registration of ammunition purchases by honest citizens will not deter criminals. Governor Brown has twice vetoed similar legislation.

Senate Bill 1446would ban the simple possession of ammunition feeding devices/magazines that are capable of holding more than 10 cartridges. The federal “large-ammunition feeding device” ban of 1994-2004 was allowed to sunset due in part to its ineffectiveness. Yet, California anti-gun legislators still are persisting with this ban knowing that the congressionally-mandated study concluded that “the banned guns were never used in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders” before the ban and the bans 10-round limit on new magazines was not a factor in multiple-victim or multiple-wound crimes.

Not one of these will make a single Californian any safer. All will make us less free.

It should be noted that the ACLU has come out against AB 2607. From the LA Times…

But the bill drew objections from the American Civil Liberties Union, which said in a letter to lawmakers that the bill “creates significant potential for civil rights violations.” Co-workers with an irrational fear may target a fellow employee without cause, and the bill lacks sufficient due process protections, the ACLU warned.

“An ex-parte order means the person subjected to the restraining order is not informed of the court proceeding and therefore has no opportunity to appear to contest the allegations,” the group said in a statement.

We will not be made any safer by banning unregistered bricks of aluminum or by regulating individual gun parts. We will not be made safer by banning firearms that were designed to comport with State law. We won’t be made any safer by allowing vengeful, gun hating extremists to “SWAT” coworkers they disagree with. We won’t be made safer by treating ammo buyers like criminals. We won’t be made safer by treating gun theft victims like criminals. Rationing guns will not make us safer. Making Californians “transfer” a firearm through a dealer to a friend at the range, before letting him or her try it out, will not make us safer. These laws are nothing more than a showcase of irrationality. The last thing we need are the phobias of extremists written into State law!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016

The legislature will convene tomorrow for the last time before summer recess. It’s anticipated that a number of gun bills will be considered in both chambers. This could be the last opportunity to voice your opposition before the bills are sent to Governor Brown’s desk for his consideration. The eligible bills range in topic but hold a central theme, limiting and restricting the rights of law abiding citizens. Click here and here for additional information on the eligible bills.

It is CRITICAL that you contact state Senators using the take action button below urging them to OPPOSE AB 450, AB 1664, AB 1673, AB 1674, AB 1695, and AB 2607.

Yesterday, June 28, the Senate Public Safety Committee passed Assembly Bill 450 on a party line vote. AB 450, sponsored by “F” rated Assembly Member McCarty, is a “gut and amend” that covered a completely different subject matter until last week. Now, AB 450 is aimed at arguably the most law-abiding citizens, CCW permit holders. The bill seeks to increase fees to not only cover issuance but also enforcement. Exactly what “enforcement” is to cover remains unclear, however what was abundantly clear is McCarty’s disdain for concealed carry permit holders and his desire to put a price tag on permits beyond the reach of average citizens.

It is important that you forward this alert to your family, friends, and fellow guns owners and sportsmen and urge them to contact state Senators and Assembly Members.